Hope and Starlight

I’ve had this title for a poem in my head for ages but didn’t know what the rest of it was, then the other day, it arrived fully formed. I hope you find it nourishing in the face of these strange and difficult times.

Of what is faith made?

Even in the darkest night
Through the stuttering concealment
Of cloudy chaos
If you keep gazing upwards
You will be blessed with starlight.
It might be fleeting.
A glimpse.
A glimmer.
So faint as to seem a mirage,
A figment of the imagination,
A fragment of hope's longing,
But it is there.
So too,
In the darkest night of our souls
Hope
Can spark
A luminary, liminal moment
A turning point
Where even despair
Can become a gateway to Grace.
But you have to keep turning
Always toward the beloved
The source of life and wonder
If that fragile flame
Is to find its way
To you.

The reductive, materialist view
Might say
Hope is a fool’s favour
A self-deceit
A weakness
Or invitation to disappointment.
Faith is yet worse
The unquestioning commitment
To a self-serving falsehood.
But that is not
What these things mean to me.
Don’t let fanatic, evangelist, or intellectual crusader
Rob you
Of these foundations of your soul.

Faith is a choice
Faith is a seeing, not a blindness
An opening, not a closing
A firm ‘commitment to’
Not a fatalistic ‘giving in’.
I choose to have hope
No matter what happens.
I choose to turn my face
To the heavens
No matter how dark the skies grow.
Faith is hope and starlight, dear ones
Faith is hope and starlight.
Keep looking, keep yearning, keep longing
Because there is beauty and wonder to be found in every moment
And it is only by turning towards it
Gazing upwards, gazing inwards, gazing towards each other and the world
That we find these motes of light
These blessings
These lotus-flowers in the muck.
Faith is not about waiting
For a better tomorrow
For a reward after death.
Faith is immediate
Immanent
Life-saving loving
Of what is
Right now.
Faith is the opening
To possibility
To finding the gold
In the grit and grime
Of life
In all its messy, fumbling majesty.

Of what is faith made?

It is made of wild wonder,
It is made of love’s longing,
It is made of optimistic opening,
It is made of fragile flames,
It is made of hope and starlight.
It is made of hope and starlight.